Exhibition Rooms

This exhibition has been assembled with the aim of propagating the dense knowledge of the little-known world of Islamic embroideries. Beyond the technical and aesthetic aspects – already fascinating in themselves – the audience will be brought to wonder about the life hidden behind each piece, imagining who might have cried on a pillow or prayed on an embroidered prayer mat.

In order to make these historical and cultural links easier to grasp, the embroideries are ordered around two axes. The first is the organisation of embroideries by region and the communities where they were produced to see the way embroideries are informed and determined by its cultural setting.
The other axis follows the theme of embroidery in nomadic and urban settings. The pieces from nomadic communities tend to be inspired by nature – alive with scorpions and rams – and the animals that were surrounding the tribes. Following a similar logic, urban textiles present us with designs geared towards the more domesticated world of the city garden and beautiful floral patterns.

Room 1: The Art of Embroidery

Embroidery in an urban settingexcelled in the production of large-scale embroideries called Suzani, designed both for use within the community and as commodities to be sold.  Embroiders relied on the production of textiles for their livelihood, at the same time they produced very personal pieces that were both utilitarian and symbolic.
In the nomadic environment, embroidery was mainly considered to be a personal, non-utilitarian and non-commercial art whose primary function lied in its symbolic significance. Women were seen as preservers of community traditions and consequently transported luxurious costumes believed to have protective talismanic properties. Thus, in the nomadic setting embroidery played a key role in rituals, maintaining community identity and protecting the family from evil.
Yet, despite the obvious diversity in style and function of the different embroideries, there are some crucial similarities that bind every piece together.

Room 2: Nomadic Costumes

Traditional women’s costume is one of the most important ways in which tribal and community identity are expressed in Central Asia and its environs.  In the Central Asian Turkoman community, the women of each sub-tribe wore clearly recognizable, distinctive costumes and jewellery during each stage of life.
 
Room 3: A Passion for Horses

The Lakai and Kungrat Uzbeks are believed to originate in the Dasht-i-Kipchak steppe, now part of Kazakhstan. Both the Lakai and Kungrat tribes have maintained a distinct historical and cultural identity as Uzbek sub-tribes. They remained pastoralist herders, moving seasonally to mountain pastures with their sheep and horse herds. Even today, when virtually all Lakai and Kungrat live in settled communities, they have preserved many nomadic-based traditions. Because manhood is closely identified with the tradition of the hero on horseback who defends tribe and tradition, horse culture and the making of elaborate horse decorations are important in many ceremonies.  

Rooms 4 & 5: Yurt Decoration

Like other nomadic Central Asian peoples of Turkic background, the Lakai and Kungrat lived in round, domed wooden latticework tents, yurts or kherga, which could be dismantled when travelling from summer to winter pastures with their flocks. A yurt or two sheltered a single family; whole clans gathered together to form tent-villages.The yurt was the economic, social and spiritual centre for the family.  Children were born and new mothers purified by the hearth fire. Old men had a saying, “Let this yurt serve me until my death. Let them carry out my dead body from this yurt.”

Room 6: A Story of Women

Every woman, rich or poor, was likely to make embroideries. An expert embroidery mistress, the ma’allema, initiated young girls to this delicate art. The workshop, darmsallma, was a means for girls and women to escape confinement in the house and a place where they could express their feelings. In contrast to the North African example, throughout Central and Western Asia, women were expected to produce textiles for dowry and household decoration and to help to furnish new homes for younger family members. Virtually all women were skilled in sewing, embroidery, patchwork and quilting.

Room 7: Urban Sophistication

Central Asia and Iran are famed for their magnificent, colourfully tiled mosques and medresses. Domestic architecture, though it shared many of the arched and domed forms of public buildings, was rather plain. Homes were primarily constructed of whitewashed mud brick. Vernacular wall-paintings of garden scenes sometimes decorated the walls of courtyards and guestrooms, but almost all patterned ornamentation and colour in the home came from domestically produced textiles.

Room 8: Echoes of the Palace

Algeria
Urban art par excellence, Algerian embroidery in the 14th century, famous for the tanchifa scarves, is the testimony of a delicate and flourishing art. Algiers’ embroidery is characterised by decoration of Turkish, Syrian, Persian and Italian influences.The pieces exhibited here are a testimony to such masterpieces in which the art of Algerian embroidery reached the heights of elegance and refinement.
Tetuan
Tetuan is known for its distinctive embroidery considered to be powerfully original. Its embroideries are a statement of the considerable impact the Andalusia legacy had on the lifestyle of people in Tetuan. Unlike most Moroccan embroidery, articles embroidered in Tetuan often make use of high quality underlying fabric, such as muslin, very fine linen or silk dyed in various colours.

Room 9: Poetic Refinement

Rabat
Moors,arriving from Spain, hardly mixed with the local populace, therefore embroidery retained its original features for a long time and evolved only very slowly until the arrival of luxury fabrics from Europe strongly influenced the embroiders who tried to combines these new forms with traditional decoration.
Chechaouen
Running point bouclé and braid-stitches were the key techniques used in “Chaounies” embroidery. The basic fabric was a thick, tough backing material such as linen cloth until it was eventually replaced with cotton.
Meknes
Meknes embroidery is a reversible, counted-thread embroidery that uses a wide variety of colours: ranging from red, yellow and orange, to green, brown, black, and more rarely blue and is unique for its the cream-coloured muslin backing fabric too fine to enable the embroiderers to count the threads.
Azemmour
Azemmour embroidery was applied exclusively to strips of un-dyed linen cloth, ten to forty centimetres wide and around two metres long. This type of work was embroidered with beautiful crimson or dark blue silk thread.

Room 10: Cultural Subtleties

Sale
Located on the far bank of the BouRegreg estuary, the white town of Sale is Rabat’s close neighbour. The embroiderers of Sale worked mainly on soft furnishings as houses were typically adorned and embellished with sumptuous curtains, door curtains and cushions.

Fez
Of all the different kinds of Moroccan embroidery, the Fez embroidery, with its elaborate ornamentation and elegant colouring, is probably the most distinctive. In the old pieces the colours are pale or deep. Dense, close-packed stitching is used throughout a single work, with the same number of threads in the warp and weft. The embroidery is reversible although one side always has a higher relief.